Jenny Gunnarsson Payne

Reproduction in transition: cross-border egg donation, biodesirability and new reproductive subjectivities on the European fertility market

Today, there should be little doubt that new reproductive technologies have ‘diversified, globalized, and denaturalized’ human reproduction (Inhorn and Birenbaum-Carmeli 2008). Not only have assisted reproductive technologies developed and spread throughout the world at a rapid pace, but this significant development has also given rise to a global market of cross-border reproductive care (CBRC). This article seeks to investigate CBRC between Sweden and the Baltic states, in which Swedish infertility patients travel to private fertility clinics as recipients of egg donation. This article argues that the restructuring of the European space (occurring in and through both the so-called ‘transition’ of the former Eastern Bloc and the expansion of the European Union) constitutes crucial conditions of emergence for the trans-European market of infertility care, which not only results in new modalities of reproductive mobility but also articulates a new set of interrelated European gendered reproductive subjectivities. Particular attention will be paid to the ways in which such ‘new reproductive subjectivities’ – here exemplified by a sample of cross-border donor egg recipients – are articulated in relation to notions of ‘choice’ and what I call ‘biodesirability’, and how such notions cannot be exempt from its specific post-socialist European context.

Rumours from around the bloc

In the past two decades, an increasing number of young women have taken the tools of media production into their own hands; feminist zines have evolved into a medium for transnational dialogue, community building, and networking. In focusing on the Plotki Femzine (2006, 2007), a Central and Eastern European (CEE) feminist print and online zine project, we use the theoretical framework of “rhizomatic media” to problematize existing scholarship on feminist zines. Much of this scholarship sees zines as venues that construct a sense of “authenticity” through the use of the autobiographical voice and an outright rejection of mainstream media practices. Considering the rhizomatic processes of alternative knowledge production in Plotki publication, we draw on post-structuralist gossip theory to examine the Plotki Femzine as a site of feminist discourse. In particular, we show how the Plotki Femzine builds cross-border collaboration and “spreads rumours” of a feminist kind.

Transgendering Mother's Day: blogging as citizens' media, reproductive rights and intimate citizenship

Citizenship is fast emerging as a central concern for transgender politics. This article approaches the topic of transgender citizenship by investigating empirically how the practice of blogging has served as a way of claiming, or practicing, intimate citizenship for transgendered people. Theorization of intimate citizenship helps us to further our understanding of the ways in which our most private decisions and practices are inextricably linked with public institutions, law and state policies. Significantly, this development is also tied up with other characteristically late modern technological advancements, ranging from new reproductive technologies to new Information and Communication Technologies. In the case of transgender politics, such interlacings become particularly perspicacious, not only due to modern discourses concerning diagnosis and treatment, but also because the presence of social media resources affords new possibilities for the sharing of personal and political narratives about ‘being transgendered’. In this article, I investigate an event in the Swedish blogosphere, namely the way in which the national celebration of Swedish Mothers Day became a site for the contestation of the current limitations of the reproductive legal rights for transgendered people, providing an opening for a more general debate on transgender reproductive rights.

Grammars of Kinship: Biological Motherhood and Assisted Reproduction in the Age of Epigenetics

In June 2012, the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology issued a press release announcing that over 5 million children worldwide had been born with the help of in vitro fertilization. Although the sheer quantity is impressive in itself, an even more significant consequence of assisted reproductive technologies is that they have transformed a previously indisputable fact concerning biological kinship and motherhood. This fact is captured in the ancient Roman legal maxim mater semper certa est (the mother is always certain), a principle that has been a central pillar for Euro-American kinship. Today, it is no longer certain that the birth mother will be defined as a child’s biological mother, and this gives rise to a flexibility in determining what biological motherhood really is. This becomes particularly significant when we look at third-party reproduction (involving a donor or surrogate) in which the meaning of biological motherhood is contextual: sometimes biological motherhood is determined with reference to nutrition via the blood, sometimes with reference to DNA, at other times with reference to epigenetic influences taking place within the womb. To deepen our understanding about the role that biology plays for the kinning process in the context of third-party reproduction, this essay introduces a theoretical framework of kinship grammars. It discusses how the kinship grammars of blood, genetics, and epigenetics offer different “rules” for determining the changing meaning of biological motherhood and suggests that a strategy of Wittgensteinian rule following in relation to the kinship grammar of epigenetics opens up the possibility for novel, perhaps even subversive, ways of thinking through kinship and biology.

The logics of Sisterhood: Intra-feminist debates in Swedish feminist zines

This article explores how during the period of 1997 to 2003 the signifier of Sisterhood came to serve as an empty signifier within and among a number of small Swedish feminist grassroots publications (i.e. zines). It begins by positioning the Swedish feminist zine community within the larger context of so-called ‘second and third wave feminisms’ but argues at the same time that it is important to break with traditional feminist chronologies, and resist reductive generational narratives of feminist movement history. On the basis of this particular empirical case the article introduces an analytic of sexual logics as an alternative for analysing feminist discourse. From here the article goes on to investigate how the notion of Sisterhood has come to serve as an empty signifier within this specific community. It concludes with a more general discussion of the function of empty signifiers in relation to recent feminist discussions of Sisterhood.

Europeanizing Reproduction: Reproductive Technologies in Europe and Scandinavia

It is estimated that today no fewer than 5 million babies have been born as a result of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) (ESRHE 2012). Although the sheer numbers are in themselves quite st...It is estimated that today no fewer than 5 million babies have been born as a result of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) (ESRHE 2012). Although the sheer numbers are in themselves quite striking, the fundamental bio-cultural transformation to which they have given rise is perhaps even more remarkable: they have, to borrow the words of pioneering scholar in the field, Sarah Franklin, become a new “fact of life” (2012: 27). This huge bio-cultural impact of ARTs has not gone unnoticed in the field of women’s and gender studies. Indeed, over 10 years ago, Charis Thompson wrote that “infertility poses a prima facie tension for feminists” (2002: 52). Thompson had in mind the tension between the potential of these technologies to overcome involuntary childlessness (a great source of suffering for many women worldwide), and the feminist tendency to strive for the interruption of gendered expectations and essentialist understandings of women’s reproduction, which many feminists have argued that ART practices tend to reproduce (2002: 52). Over the years, and in the wake of a thoroughgoing transnationalization of fertility care, this “prima facie tension for feminists” has, as we shall see, come to be understood, to an increasing extent, as intersecting with a tension between “the global” and “the local”. The aim of this review article is to investigate this feminist tension between “the global” and “the local” in the specific Scandinavian context. Through a reading of two recent books—the edited volume Reproductive Technologies as Global Form: Ethnographies of Knowledge, Practices, and Transnational Encounters (Knecht et al. 2012) and Marit Melhuus’s monograph Problems of Conception: Issues of Law, Biotechnology, Individuals and Kinship (2012)—I shall discuss an overarching

Moving images, transforming media: The mediating communitas of Hallon TV and DYKE HARD

This article investigates the queer feminist Swedish media projects HallonTV and DYKE HARD in order to argue that media production is constitutive of political movements as such. Particular attention is paid to an integral dimension of the constitution of such a political collectivity, namely its affective features. It is concerned with how a sense of ‘community’ comes to be ‘experienced’ by those who are involved, first-hand, in the development and extension of its messages to a wider public. Theoretically, the article proposes that these features will be better appreciated through both a harnessing of the discourse theoretical framework of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as well as a reworking of the anthropologist Victor Turner’s idea of communitas.This article investigates the queer feminist Swedish media projects HallonTV and DYKE HARD in order to argue that media production is constitutive of political movements as such. Particular attention is paid to an integral dimension of the constitution of such a political collectivity, namely its affective features. It is concerned with how a sense of ‘community’ comes to be ‘experienced’ by those who are involved, first-hand, in the development and extension of its messages to a wider public. Theoretically, the article proposes that these features will be better appreciated through both a harnessing of the discourse theoretical framework of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as well as a reworking of the anthropologist Victor Turner’s idea of communitas.

Gendered states and gender nomads: The transgender phenomenon : [Recension av:] Richard Ekins, Dave King, The transgender phenomenon

Gendered states and gender nomads: The transgender phenomenon : [Recension av:] Richard Ekins, Dave King, The transgender phenomenon